Down by the Docks
by RoseInStillWaters
Summary: The story of how Spot Conlon became the King of Brooklyn and most respected newsie in New York, as told by his closest confidantes- please R and R!
1. Chapter 1

**Down by the Docks-** _Or, How Spot Conlon came to be King of Brooklyn, as told by his closest friends- the Brooklyn newsies._

_Part One: Seabutch_

"It's a barque."

"Betcha not."

Spot Conlon sent a glob of saliva into the waters of the bay and regarded the ship far out on the horizon with his usual steely glare.

"Barque."

I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to start a beef with Spot Conlon, King of Brooklyn. He was one of my closest friends, almost a brother, a hero to me, the most powerful and respected newsie in New York, the person I had to thank for giving me a leg up in the cutthroat world of New York's slums. But now was not the best time to win a few of his best shooters based on a slight difference in boat rigs. Never mind I was the expert.

Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Spot leaned a bit forward on his shipping-crate throne, staring Southwest down the busy shipping lane.

"You was right, Butch. She's a brigantine."

I grunted in acknowledgement.

"It's only fair that I pays ya." And he flipped a pair of choice shooters my way.

I snatched them out of the air and offered them on opened palm back to Spot.

"Naw, the angle was wrong. You keep 'em."

"I don't-" Spot was about to launch into one of his lectures, a lecture on the honorable thing to do, when something over my shoulder distracted him.

I turned slowly, looking down the slope of the shipping crate mountain that served as Brooklyn headquarters. I looked down the length of the dock, at the tanned bodies of Spot's best and brightest (not to mention biggest and baddest) personal cohort of newsie followers swimming in the briny depths of the bay. I looked out to where the boards of the dock met the cobbles of Gold Street (which was not, in fact, gold). And there, I saw his target.

A girl. Couldn't tell how she looked from a distance, but her swinging skirt was all Spot needed to see to hand me his cane, leap from the crates, and go swaggering off in the direction of Gold Street. One lucky lady was about to be wooed by the King of Brooklyn himself.

She was the seventh that day.

I sighed, plopped myself down on a crate, and laid the can across my lap. Here I was again, holding down the fort, holding the cane (rumored by the more superstitious types to hold all of Brooklyn's power- they say Spot sold his gall bladder to the devil, or the ghost of Boss Tweed, for it) across my lap and wondering for the umpteenth time how a kid no taller than my elbow got to run the newsboy underworld with so little effort, you'd think he was born to do it.

Well, I guess I had the answer. We all knew. As I looked at the boys on the dock, diving into the water and clambering back out, it struck me that most of us would. Spot Conlon knew a thing or two about choosing his friends and keeping them close.

He kept his enemies closer still

As the summer sun and sea breeze pulled a blanket over my shoulders, I slipped back in time, to sometime not so very long ago, the day when I first met Spot Conlon.

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.

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_I had been no more than twenty-four hours off a transcontinental train and was still shaking cinders from my overgrown hair. I was on solid land for one of the first times in the past seven years and still reeling from the stillness that sat under my feet. _

_But New York was never still, and here I was, lost and utterly alone._

_Being raised to take the pitch and roll of a clipper in stride, I wasn't particularly disconcerted. In the last two weeks, my father had been swept out into the sea, and I had been unceremoniously marooned at the nearest port. From there I did the only sensible thing- I wrote a note to Mam, mailed it, and used the small sack of dollars Pa had kept in his seabag to buy me a ticket East. A couple thousand miles of close quarters and chugging locomotion later, I was standing on the corner of Broadway, with nothing to my name (which happened to be Brendan Patrick Clement Murphy Lynch) but a sea bag the size of my head, the clothes on my back, and the cob pipe in my mouth that I had filched from Pa's possessions before the rest of the crew had taken their shares. _

_There were only two things running through my head._

_First was the moment Pa had gone; one minute he was up in the head rig, like always laughing into the teeth of a gale, straddling the bowsprit and lashing a jib in._

_The next, a rogue wave met us from head-on. A wall of foam and a roar; when the Fair Winifred dashed back down, father was gone. The jib, however, was lashed in with perfect form. _

_The second thought: I needed a smoke._

_However, my last match had been used up somewhere around Pike's Peak, and I was clean out of tinder._

_So I just stood there on Broadway, eleven years old and all alone, a cold pipe sticking out of my mouth. _

"_Hey kid!"_

_I looked around._

"'_Ey! Over here!"_

_I looked behind me to see a boy about my age emerging from an alley._

"_Hey kid. You need a light?"_

"_Aye."_

_And the boy pulled a paper book of matches from a pocket. _

_._

_._

_._

_That boy was Spot Conlon, and ever since that moment, we'd been friends. _

**So that's one little story, but trust me the rest will be much more informative. Do Read and Review! I'll love you forever. **


	2. Chapter 2

**Thanks for the reviews! :D**

_Part 2: Boid_

"Ey, Boidy, what's the news?"

I found it ironic that a newsboy would be asking this question.

"Couldn't tell you, Tycho," I sighed, throwing my hands up in the air as I pattered down the dock at my usual sprinting pace.

"C'mon!" Tycho slipped back into the depths of the bay, a pleading look in his eyes.

"I wouldn't know if there was news to tell. Me, I'm just a lowly runner for Brooklyn's own king." I pulled a diplomatic bow while still in motion and continued on my merry way, the shipping crate castle at the end of the dock in my sights.

"If it's important, I'll find it out!" Tycho called after me.

I snorted under my breath, knowing very well that this particular tidbit was one that Tycho or any of the other workaday Brooklyn newsies wouldn't be hearing until King Spot was good and ready to tell them. As for me, well, I knew everything.

I was Spot's best runner, known for my speed and stealth in navigating New York City's gnarl of boroughs and backalleys, easily lost in a crowd when I wanted to be and smart enough to find my way from Staten Island to the Bronx and back again blindfolded.

In addition, I owed my life to Spot Conlon, so I wasn't too likely to go turncoat and defect to another borough. Pain of death wouldn't be enough to make me spill some of the secrets that I had carried from Queens, Midtown, Manhattan, or the Bowery for Spot's ears only.

"Boid my man!" Spot was draped across his crate throne, aimlessly plinking away at a target with his treasured slingshot- I heard him say once that her name was Eleanor.

"News from Battleaxe, Spot."

With this he perked up like a daisy and swiveled to face me, intense blue eyes practically boring a hole in my head from which to extract the secret. "What of it?"

Spot's cohort- Seabutch, Lefty, Boz, Gap, Johnny Doves, and Hoptoad- all moved off down the pier to scare a flock of seagulls off of some distant rock. They respected his privacy with all due reverence.

Conlon beckoned me closer, and I delivered my report.

"Battleaxe McCarty sends his regards and requests a couple strong men to help him out with some trouble he's predicting for Thursday night."

"An' what's Thursday night?" asked Spot, suspicious.

"General meeting of all the Queens newsies, is what," I gulped. "He thinks there's a faction tryin' to throw him out, and-"

Spot held up a slender hand. "Say no more, my good, Boid," he said. "You be ready Wednesday night to run tell me if there's any sign of a fight. If there is-" he smacked his cane down on his palm, hard- "I'll make a personal appearance."

How Spot, towering over New York City at five feet, four inches, got to be king is sorta tied into my story, as well as that of Battleaxe McCarty, the strapping king of Queens. It's one of the stories that I keep swimming around in my head, even when the rest have been let go to make room for more important messages brought between boroughs.

/

/

/

_Spot Conlon started out, by my reckoning, just like the rest of us newsies. He was born to immigrant parents, his mother from Meath and his father from Dublin's fair city. I don't know how they treated him, but whether good or bad he one day showed up on the steps of the Brooklyn lodging house, asking for work._

_And that's where the story begins. _

_As a cute little kid with massive blue eyes and a quavery chin, Spot was instantly picked up by Dredger, the Brooklyn boss at the time. Somehow he came by the nickname that he's known by to this day, but I haven't yet been privy to that story, either. Some say it's because of his quick eye and quicker shot in a fight- they say he could spot an attacker from a hundred yards and fetch him a stone to the eye in just under that. _

_In any case, he quickly became the protégé of the massive King Dredger. He was clever, ruthless, and never backed down from a fight, even against boys three times his size. I remember well the story of a skirmish against some Staten Island boys, when Spot was said to have somehow fought his way out of a pile of six thugs with nothing more than a fat lip and some missing hair. _

_It was his air of mystery that made Spot all the more revered. Dredger would give him an assignment- go make that scab off'a twelfth street shut 'is trap about the fight Friday, awright?- and the deed would be done without a word by sunrise the next day. Spot was a vicious fighter, a smooth negotiator, a gambler with either all the luck in the world or some wicked methods of cheating. And we all knew that he somehow cheated death, doom, and destruction with a devil-may-care attitude and a saucy wink to the nearest lady._

_I had my own theory about why Spot was so successful. _

_I became a newsie after being mugged by some Queens boys._

_I was stealing myself, stealing purses from some high-class ladies in Central Park to pay the rent on my older brother's Brooklyn flat. He had disappeared into the North months before, but I had this silly hope that he would darken the door any day now. _

_Anyways, some bulls saw me, yelled after me, chased me through the streets. I was fast but it was a market Saturday and the streets were teeming with New Yorkers of every creed and color. There was quite the hullabaloo. I hitched a ride on back of a horse-cab; they called ahead for reinforcements. By the time I sprinted across the bridge and along the shore, I knew that someone had put two and two together and sent a copper over to the deserted flat to take me in. I must have had hundreds in cash stashed in those silky purses._

_Word, as I now know, gets around, and there were gangs of newsies stalking abroad, wanting either a cut of my takings or the reward for turning me in._

_I ran the border between Brooklyn and Queens, knowing that any confrontation here would be between the two boroughs over their right to mug me. Turns out, I was right._

_I was backed into an alley by a mob from Queens, out for blood and led by Battleaxe McCarty, a hulking barrel-chested newsboy who would one day become the king of Queens. I was about to be pummeled when a group of Brooklyns led by Dredger, Spot among them, dropped down from the alley wall and clapped their hands onto my person. _

_Queens didn't like that._

_There was a brawl. Dredger and Battleaxe went for each other's throats. Everyone lost sight of the prize, that prize being me._

_All, that is, but Spot Conlon. He tucked me under a wiry arm and somehow climbed the nearest fire escape and has us over the wall and onto Brooklyn turf before I could say bobsyouruncle. _

"_You okay, kid?" he asked._

_I nodded silently, clutching the purses._

_Hi gaze cut like a knife, but after a minute his hard line of a mouth softened somewhat. _

"_So what's the money for?"_

"_Rent."_

"_You're just a poor kid in a bad place, ain't ya?" he still sounded like he might snap my arm off for backtalk._

"_Tell ya what," he said after a moment. "Them guys over there-" he motioned across the wall- "they'll tear each other to pieces over pride rather than use their brains. But we can all benefit from this. Are you listening, kid?"_

_I nodded again._

"_Then you do as I say. I get one a' these-" he took the purse, "-and you take the rest. Run as fast as you can until you find a copper and turn the rest in. Tell 'em that some drunk bum tore the other one out of your hands. You come find me after and if you've done right I'll give you enough for your rent. The rest we split even between Brooklyn an' Queens. Savvy?"_

_I nodded._

"_Say, kid, you'se like a bird on those feet a' yours. If you ever need a job," he jerked a thumb back Brooklyn way- "I'd be willin' to take a chance on ya." And with that he disappeared into the alleys, only to pop his head back out a second later._

"_Oh, and report a row over Bloch street way. We'se gonna need some cleanup."_

Dredger lost an ear in the fight, and Battleaxe busted every knuckle he owned. Their newsies were no better off. Spot, however, brokered a peace between them over the money and was lauded as the great compromiser of the city. When Dredger resigned for the factories, Spot was the only likely successor, with a record promising intelligence and lucrative dealings.

And me? Well, I did Spot one better. I turned in the money, spent my penalty night in the refuge, then sold the apartment and made tracks for the docks where my new big brother had a job for me.


	3. Chapter 3

Thanks for the reviews! I'm going to try to keep the chapters shorter so I can do more of them.

Chapter 3: Johnny Doves

"Doves."

Spot snapped his fingers and pointed towards a tattered brown sack at his feet.

"Count up, me hearty." And Brooklyn's king tipped his head back and started chuckling, at first low and long but increasingly hysterical until his screeches could be heard echoing off the nearest drydocked frigate.

I gingerly hefted the bag, loath to soil my trousers, and tested its weight. "Silver, Spot?"

Spot was still laughing, so hard tears were rolling down his face.

"Where did you acquire this silver, pray tell?" I asked, clinking a pair of dollar coins into my hand.

Spot was trying to compose himself.

"They're newly minted, shiny as milady's very mirror," I commented. "You didn't-"

Spot turned mock-serious. He did a fair job of acting incensed, but I could see his tomcat smile prodding at the sides of his mouth.

"Now John. Johnny Doves, me good sir. You accusin' me of graft?"

"Nossir, Mr. Conlon sir," I snickered.

He hooted wildly for an instant, unable or unwilling to contain his mirth. "Well, Doves me lad, graft it will have to be, for you'd never believe the real story."

"It must be a riot," I said drily. I had, meanwhile, counted out a pile of thirty-three dollars, solid silver.

A slow smile crept across Spot's face, molasses in January. "it's protection money," he smirked.

"From?"

Thirty-five.

Spot began to bellow. The newsies in the water stirred and looked up, worrying that their king was bound for bedlam.

Thirty-six.

"Tha' money you'se holding is protection money from the Brooklyn Rippers 'emselves."

I took in a sharp breath, then let it out in a laugh to make waves in the channel. "You mean to tell me that a gang- a real gang, with real thugs and mugs and ex-cons and politicos- is paying newsboys for protection?"

Spot fell off of his crate and began rolling around on the dock, in fits of laughter. Not very becoming of a king, but he had earned it. He was Spot Conlon, after all. If the leaders of two of the borough's toughest gangs were paying a scrawny fifteen-year-old kid to save their sorry hides, he could laugh just as much as he saw fit.

Fifty-six. Fifty-six dollars so far, straight silver.

"Thing is," he gasped between bleats of laughter, "me an' you an' the rest of our Brooklyn boys just might play a hand in the next big gang war 'tween the Rippers and the Forty Thieves. Johnny Doves, I welcome you to the big time."

_They call me Doves because I'm supposed to be the fancy one. My hands, they said, were soft and white as baby doves. They were kidding, of course, and now they're anything but clean. Like any other newsie from Bronx to Brooklyn, Uptown, Midtown, or Bowery, I've got ink beneath my nails and a lattice of papercuts on each palm. But back before I was a newsie, my parents sent me to seven years of private school, which is more education than all of my news-touting brethren have put together. Sometimes I even wore kid gloves, which if the boys knew about would bring down a world of ribbing on my head. We were rich once, well-off, solidly planted in the class of the muckety-mucks, but then my father blew the fortune on a failed silver mine out west._

_And that's when I became a newsie._

_Brooklyn does, if you could believe it, have a nice section. Big houses, green lawns, carriages, separate doors for the servants. It was one day when I was twelve that I tiptoed out of the servant door of my parents' house in this section and struck a course north by northeast for the docks. Like anybody else, I knew that a rough and ready gang of buy-me-pape boys had a hideout there, and I was aiming to get a job. Mother and Father, despite out evident dearth of money, insisted on maintaining their previous standard of living. This was something that simple mathematics would simply not allow._

_So, I thought I'd lend a hand._

_I purposely wore my most ill-fitting clothes, but their spotless nature still stuck out among the stained and patched clothing billowing overhead as I passed through the alleys. Walking the gauntlet of bare-chested lugs doing the backstroke in the harbor once I found the docks made me even more self-conscious of how much I didn't belong there._

_But this was Brooklyn. If you wanted to succeed, you needed a union. And to get put up in a union, you needed to go to the boss himself._

_The boss himself was in some sort of war council when I showed up, with a massive crowd of boys gathered around him. There were leaders I could tell, one tall and loud with a red bandana and cowboy hat; one carried a gnarled club and had a stove-in porkpie hat on his head; one was as aquiline and genteel as my wealthiest classmates. But I knew immediately who the king of Brooklyn was._

_He was the shortest, the smallest, and had the craziest glint in his eye. He was trying to shush the other rabbling newsies, something over a… a name._

_They were placing bets. _

_I stood there like a pillar of salt, not wanting to eavesdrop but needing to gain an audience with his Scrawniness. Thankfully, fortune smiled down upon me._

"_Hey kid!" It was the king, his Scrawniness, the boy who I would soon know as Spot Conlon._

_I looked up._

"_Yeah you! Pretty boy! You look like you've seen some schooling. You know how to spell 'Coe-shoooz-ko?' An' furthermore, what's a Coe-shooze-ko?"_

_I smiled. This answer, I knew._

"_Tadeusz Kosciusko- that's k-o-s-c-i-u-s-k-o- was a Polish soldier who joined the American Revolutionary army and built the garrisons and West Point, uh, sir, and they made him a general, um, and they're planning to build a bridge named for him," I finished lamely with all eyes on me. "Uh, here in New York."_

_Spot pounded his crate. "There ya have it, Jacky boy. It's a bridge, not a statue!"_

"_But it's still a guy!" bellowed the pork-pie newsie._

"_Put a lid on it, Batteaxe, an' pay up." _

_The others flicked half-cents in Spot's direction and he swiped them from the air before turning back to me._

"_So who're ya with, pretty boy? 'Cause you're not gonna be with 'em for long. As of this moment, you're my walkin' mouth, as the saying goes."_


End file.
